Seven New Principles of Software Engineering

Transcript

1. Open Source Seven New Principles of Software Engineering Yegor Bugayenko #ITGorky @ Нижний Новгород October 17th, 2026
2. 2/10 According to GitHub leadership, the platform processed roughly 1 billion commits in 2025. In 2026, that number is expected to exceed 14 billion commits. --- @naro7217 on Medium; Jul 24, 2026 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
3. 3/10 p r a h S → Readable Providing an LLM with "incorrect" documentation can greatly hinder code understanding, while incomplete or missing documentation does not seem to significantly affect an LLM's ability to understand code. --- William Macke and Michael Doyle on arXiv; Apr 3, 2024 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
4. 4/10 e v i v e R → Rewrite In the past, uplifting a legacy codebase used to be a risky and expensive endeavour. Many are the technical debt backlogs that never got priority. The economics for dealing with technical debt have changed. Dramatically. A legacy uplift that would traditionally have been a 12–18 month, high-risk engineering project was completed in three weeks of part-time work for roughly $4,000 in AI costs. --- Adam Tornhill on CodeScene blog; Sep 24, 2026 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
5. 5/10 n o i t c a r t s i D → n o i t n Atte In practice, reviews of agent-generated code become rubber-stamps: the human approves because the code looks correct, because the tests pass, and because the cognitive cost of genuine scrutiny is prohibitive. The assurance that review is supposed to provide is illusory. --- Martin Monperrus on arXiv; Jun 11, 2026 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
6. 6/10 t c e j e R → Respect The cost of code improvements has dropped so low that we can afford a zero tolerance attitude to minor code smells and inconveniences. --- Simon Willison on his blog; 2025 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
7. 7/10 y t i l i b i s i V → y t i l i b a n Maintai YAML is code. It is precise and diff-friendly. [...] YAML holds the source of truth; the renderer is the lens. --- Weiwen Weng in dev.to; Jun 30, 2026 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
8. 8/10 t c a p m I Diff → My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That's the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. --- Robert C. Martin on X; Jul 23, 2026 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
9. 9/10 d e e p S Stability → Higher AI adoption is associated with an increase in both software delivery throughput and software delivery instability. --- Jessica Baolin and Nathen Harvey in DORA Report; Mar 10, 2026 #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256
10. 10/10 @yegor256news #ITGorky October 17th, 2026 @yegor256